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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Catching up after FMAs before Finance club trip to NYC

Whew...and I thought I became a teacher in part to avoid business travel. LOL...After spending a week in Ohio with BonaResponds, a trip to Orlando for the FMAs, and now to NYC with the finance club should make me ready to stay home for a while.

The FMAs were great. I apologize for not getting more online about them already. I have a notebook full of papers to summarize, just need a few minutes to breathe. From a quality of paper point of view, it may have been the best FMA conference I have been to.

I have not counted how many papers were presented, but it had to be somewhere about 400-500. At any given point there were 25-30 sessions going. Each author had about 20 minutes to discuss the paper and then a discussant had 7 minutes to make comments. For the last few minutes it was then "thrown open" to the crowd for comments. In most of the sessions there were three papers. So it was utterly impossible to see it all.

Combine the many sessions with interviewing (have I mentioned we are hiring ? ;) ) and I only got to see a very small fraction. But I tried to get to the papers that would either help with class or my own research, or just seemed too interesting to pass up. So I think I had a good mix. (of course I had to leave sessions now and then and if I skipped out of yours, I apologize. I assure you it was nothing you said!)

Over the next few weeks I will recap and summarize the best of these so that you too can enjoy some of the conference (of course without having to travel to Orlando, which cemented its place into my least favorite US city list).

Hopefully these summaries will start later this afternoon, but with a NYC trip (I leave at 3:00 AM) and a student life meeting at 4:00 PM, no guarantees ;).